ARM, the Cambridge UK superchip designer, has launched a second generation of ARM Mali™-T600 Graphics Processing Unit - targeting high performance devices, such as smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.

It says the products are the first to include Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), a texture compression technique that originated from ARM.

According to ARM, STC significantly optimises GPU performance and increases battery life in devices, enabling an always-on, always-connected experience. The technology has now been adopted by the Khronos™ Group, an important industry consortium that focuses on open standards.

Based on the Mali Midgard architecture, the second generation of the Mali-T600 Series comprises three GPUs - the Mali-T624, Mali-T628 and Mali-T678. Each product has been tuned to provide optimal performance and energy-efficiency for different end devices.

ARM says the Mali-T624 and Mali-T628 products provide market leading graphics and GPU compute to smartphones and smart-TVs, while the Mali-T678 has been optimised to address the demands of the rapidly growing tablet market.

ARM continues to invest in GPU compute capabilities by integrating the leadership tit has in the CPU space, with ARM Cortex™ processors, and applying it to the Mali architecture.

GPU compute enables greater control when balancing tasks between the CPU and GPU, allowing performance of the right task by the most efficient architecture. This enables improved energy-efficiency for current and new math intensive activities, such as:-

• Computational photography – computational methods of enhancing or extending digital photography

• Multi perspective views – the ability to have multiple views from different positions

• Real-time photo editing on mobile devices – photo editing at your fingertips on your smartphone, tablet, etc

GPU compute also extends the range of use cases possible on mass-market mobile devices, allowing features like photo editing and video stabilisation to be available in a wider range of consumer products.

“People expect higher standards of visual computing on their smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs with seamless access to their digital world and personal content,” said ARM’s Pete Hutton.

“GPU compute enables this as it increases the range of functions mobile devices can perform within the available battery life. ARM continues to focus on system-wide optimisation by integrating market leading CPU and GPU technologies to drive both high performance and energy-efficiency.”